nlitened

> I would expect a majority of nouns to be according to the animate / inanimate split

Well, as I understand, the actual animate/inanimate split was there at least 10 000 years ago (or more)! And the language has gradually changed over the years until it's barely recognizable. For half of the period that passed we didn't even have written languages, and can only approximately deduce the words by tracing their common origins in related languages.

See how modern English has changed in 500 years from the earlier Middle English — as a non-native English speaker, I can barely recognize a few things, and it's otherwise completely unintelligible for me. Now multiply that change by at least 20x.

So how words are split between genders in modern languages - has very little relation to how they were before. For example, in modern Spanish, masculine gender is a fusion of Latin masculine and neuter genders. So technically if we say that in Classical Latin there was still a statistically significant animate/inanimate split between masculine and neuter genders - nowadays it's the same single gender in Spanish.

For example, if I am talking about a window and a door, and a window is masculine and a door is feminine, I can use the pronoun "it" in either masculine or feminine form to clearly refer to one or the other. Or I could use a verb "opened" in a masculine or feminine form, and it will be clear which of two things I mean without explicitly repeating.

> I am really confused as to how it ever developed

Upon digging, I actually found it fascinating. As I understand how it happened for Proto-Indo-European languages (with a bit of healthy speculation because for the earlier parts there's not much reliable statistical data to confirm it exactly, and there are always some competing explanations by different linguists):

First, before PIE, the older language had no genders, but instead had cases with a twist similar to what they have in Basque language: instead of our usual nominative+accusative cases it had absolutive+ergative cases. The difference is as follows in two sentences: "cat walks" and "dog eats bone". In modern PIE descendants we have "cat" and "dog" in nominative, and "bone" is in accusative case. In modern Basque and the hypothetic language before PIE the "cat" and the "bone" are in absolutive case, and the "dog" is in ergative.

So basically, there was a word form that meant "something does action upon something else" and another word form that meant "something receives an action from another actor or performs the action by itself".

Then these word forms were reinterpreted as "people or animals that do things" and "inanimate or dumb things". So it became two genders: animate and inanimate. People started assigning new words to these genders (sometimes randomly).

Then the plural form of inanimate gender started meaning collective and abstract things. As an analogy, "cows" would also start meaning a collective "herd", not only multiple cows; "grains" would start meaning "cereal", not only multiple grains of wheat. Over time, people started conjugating the plural inanimate abstract words in a pattern similar to singular animate, thus a third gender appeared - many thousand years later we called it "feminine", the former animate gender we started calling "masculine", and the former inanimate gender we started calling "neuter" (literally means "neither").

After the word gender patterns established over time, new words and new word forms started being distributed among these genders also without strict rules, sometimes by chance, or by analogy with existing words that sounded similarly in that period.

Thus we had three genders of Proto-Indo-European languages that developed over millenia for no particular reason and without a specific goal, just naturally and due to fossilizing old speech elements being reinterpreted a little bit differently by new generations — over many generations over thousands of years.

You probably mean word genders? So you probably say it's sometimes difficult to derive the gender of a noun, hence the correct article

As I understand, the son is there not to lead the company (Greg Abel is the CEO), but to oversee their family's share in the enterprise.

So Orbs are like Grok Bots, I guess? Now every company has to copy this feature, and name it differently

But if you don’t, you don’t use Python anyway

I think Pareto principle applies here: most discussions will be shallow, only occasionally diving deep — and Twitter acknowledges that reality, and builds around it.

Network effect. Most people worth discussing with are already there, so more people join the discussion there, and so on.

> I'm not even going to criticize DHH for getting that money, good for him

He's not getting that money, he literally donated 10% of that money himself

Well, don't use it

What alternative plan are you implementing?

I agree overall, however:

> A lot of the less popular alternatives (just going with Prometheus, Victoriametrics, etc) are de-facto competing smaller standards

By all metrics (hah), Prometheus is the more popular solution and is the de-facto standard, as far as I know.

I didn’t like what the market was offering, and I didn’t like depending on other people not firing me, so I made one for myself where I can work on what I like the way I like (started a small software business).

You can, too. It’s the simplest and cheapest business to start in the entire history of humankind, and you literally just sit with your laptop at home all day pressing buttons

> It feels like my career went from upwards to a horizontal line. I have far less energy for work, for learning, and for the things I'm interested in. It's incredibly demoralising

How do you separate how much having kids affects this, and how much of it is just being 30+ and not taking care of own health?

I have a few childless friends who say the same thing word for word.

Man, re-read this comment in 10 years

> If you would just distribute it equally to all relevant citizens

Ironically, this approach would give power to an entity that decides who is relevant and who becomes a citizen, which is the government.

What are some examples of uncontroversial figures who would be willing to offer funding, in your opinion?

Well if it's moral for gatekeepers of talent to hoard immense intellectual rights to be protected by the violence of the state, then I'm immoral in that sense. Information wants to be free

> The least these companies can do is to publish everything they own

Well, being able to talk to superintelligent all-knowing savant 24/7 on your phone for $20 a month is also something

The author blames capitalism and religion while greatly indulging in his pride, I think.

It is so much beneath him to ask for help from others, he’d rather change the world so that he doesn’t have to ask — instead of expressing some humility.

I also have a lot of pride in myself, and I feel deeply for the author. However it looks to me that he’a banging on the wrong door, and instead of waiting for all the people in the world to change a lot, he could change himself a little.

I think you described not monolith vs microservices, but single person working on a project and making decisions vs multiple. “Everyone’s responsibility is no-one’s responsibility” works the same way if multiple people work on the same microservice.

Also a monolith may (actually, must) have internal public interfaces through which components must communicate, and those contracts are more enforceable, amenable to static checks, and much higher performance that microservices’ network interfaces.

There's a nice Java library called Clojure with a lightweight syntax if you need to work with data structures and concurrency in Java a lot:

    (println (json/generate-string {:providers ["SUN" "SunRsaSign" "SunEC"]}))

I have a very simple and easy solution: allow any person with any medical education from any country around the world to practice medicine in their field of study, and relieve them from any medical malpractice responsibility (apart from criminal). Let them prescribe medicine, no paperwork, no regulation.

Anybody can choose to which hospital they go, the “state-licensed” crazy expensive one or the “unlicensed” one for 50 dollars a visit.

As far as I understand, currently the pool of people in the US who are allowed to do medical work is artificially limited, and doctors’ salaries are inflated. Just look around the world, there’s a huge supply of doctors with no student debt who would be happy to work for 60k a year. Also tens of thousands of US citizens will just go get a cheap medical degree from other countries, come back, and open private practice.

Design (output of designers) and copy (output of copywriters) are subject to the same copyright law as code (output of programmers). Programmers are not the only people whose intellectual property is protected.

That’s kinda my point. We don’t have usage caps not because they are technically hard or impossible to implement (they’re not). It’s because the leadership thinks (likely correctly) that implementing them would just hurt company’s bottom line.

I am very sure what you’re saying is not true. It’s a viable-looking technical excuse, but you can easily understand that it’s false.

Let’s make a thought experiment.

CEO of Cloudflare introduces hard billing caps at a _business_ (not technical) level. Your organization will never be billed more than the level you set. Your app may stop, or may continue running, but above the monthly cap it’s free for you, it becomes Cloudflare’s expense if they didn’t pause the services.

I guarantee you that in this case, all technical issues you’re talking about would be solved in three weeks, and your service would go down within 3 seconds after hitting the cap.

If CEO decision were that any over-usage above the cap is deducted from employee bonuses from the specific product division that didn’t stop spending in time — all technical challenges would be solved in 48 hours.

Currently, there are literally zero organizational incentives for CloudFlare to develop any usage caps

About three weeks ago I was seduced by people singing praise to OpenClaw, and also by the fact that OpenClaw team burns millions of dollars of tokens per month on developing it — surely it must be good.

It turned out to be probably the crappiest, glitchiest piece of software I’ve used in the past few years. Its basic onboarding workflow was completely broken, GUI was a hallucinated mess.

Also it turned out that not a single person I know who dedicated time to configuring it, ever achieved anything remotely interesting as a result.

They don't force anybody though. People who think that the renting is too expensive and is not worth paying, are free to either 1) move to a place that has cheaper rent, or 2) build a new house from scratch since it's cheaper than renting.

Price of rent increasing in desirable locations is not due to greed or collusion of bad actors (as long as government prevents monopolies), it's due to more people competing to live in a place that can house only a limited number. Of course everybody wants to live in big cities in the US. But rent is very cheap in dying small towns in the middle of nowhere.

I'd really love to understand why you see it that way. In what way do investors force anybody to do anything?